The Girl With Secrets
by gladheonsleeps
Summary: I honestly started writing this as a 'what if Hermione was like Michelle in Spider-Man homecoming' In short, a new girl has appeared at Hogwarts and Regulus Black isn't the only person to find her frustratingly obtuse and incredibly strange. He is however, the only one she seems to pay any attention to in return Unfortunately that only seems to confuse him all the more
1. chapter 1

_**(There is a note about the story after this chapter with warnings etc etc)**_

_**This story is a transformative work and thus I don't own the characters or Hogwarts etc etc**_

Regulus sat in his usual seat in the back of the classroom near the window. The seat next to him was empty, as he had glared the guts out of anyone who dared come near him often enough by now that they all had the message. Class was hard enough to get through without some..._person_...in his face with all of their magic and their emotions and other filthy things all over the place.

He needed the wide window of empty sky and that blissfully empty seat so that he could concentrate on his work. He had just laid out his parchment, his inkwell and his new favourite quill, the one that made _just_ the right kind of sound against the surface of the parchment when _she_ entered the room; a mess of hair and magic everywhere.

Regulus knew he lived a sheltered life; he had to with his temperament. But he had a feeling that this...girl...was rather unique in her chaos; this near feral creature who had mysteriously showed up to be sorted on the first of September that year with absolutely no explanation and shocking even the ever 'above everything and thus constantly amused' Albus Dumbledore (who she didn't even deem worthy of a conversation, he'd heard).

Whoever she was, she was always alway _always_ a mess. Even when she wasn't, her uniform was just…off. Her skirt looked like she'd gone back to the 1930's just to acquire it; her ties were clearly made of high quality silk, but again looked like they were old; they were slightly wider than those everyone else wore, and she had a habit of tucking them into the lower buttons on her shirt instead of simply using a sticking charm like _civilised_ people, and her shirts…well they looked like they had been made for an eleven year old boy, but again there was always something wrong with them, like repairs done with the wrong colour thread or buttons that had been replaced by others that didn't match. There were tortoise shell buttons next to dainty pearl buttons next to wooden buttons...seemingly all colours of the rainbow.

Today she stumbled in with the buttons of her blouse done up wrong, the gaping holes brazenly displaying the forest green lace of her brassiere. Her hippogriff's nest of hair was an even bigger mess than usual; and one sock, the right one, with thick red and gold stripes marking her as a barbaric Gryffindor was stretched out of shape and sat bunched sadly at the top of her boot in a mockery of the other, which was striped with the colours of the Peverell clan, and happily sat snugly where it belonged, pulled up over her knee and hugging her shapely thigh.

She didn't even bother trying to pull the sock up as she bustled over and sat in his chair, ignoring his most poisonous glare as she apologised to the Professor for her late entrance, or rather _intrusion_.

As it was Binns, she needn't have bothered.

Salazar how he loathed her. He couldn't help the silver edged shiver of fear that trailed up his spine as her thigh brushed his hand that was hidden, clenching the seat of his chair to resist hexing her as she sat with her legs wide open and rifled through her bag, which was sitting on the floor between her feet. It was the leg that had the horrible sock, and she had to hike up her preposterously long skirt so that she could see her bag; thus it was her skin--hairless and satin soft except for a scar on her thigh with the telltale golden sheen of a well healed dragon fire burn--that had touched him. He swallowed nervously, closing his eyes and then opening them, then resolutely staring out the window as he suppressed the impulse to cause a scene by yanking it away and casting a cleansing spell, or even worse, scrambling out over their desks and bolting out of the door like he truly wished to.

It was still there. _She_ was still there.

Salazar! Weren't women's thighs supposed to be sensitive to touch? Why would she want to be sitting there carelessly _rubbing_ it all over some stranger? He swallowed thickly.

Finally she found whatever she was looking for and straightened, her thigh moving away from him again and disappearing back under the pleated wool of her skirts; though his hand still burned with her touch, as did the humiliation at the knowledge of the tightness in his pants due to the responsiveness she never failed to bring out in him.

He should hate her; and yet she made him _burn_ with want. The buttons made his fingers twitch with the urge to fix them, undoing them all before he buttoned them back up one at a time. He wanted to tenderly draw the sock up her leg and linger on her skin; imagined kissing her knee before he drew the fabric over it.

She smelled like amortentia, a curious combination of rose, cinnamon, orange and coconut; her magic felt like an ocean storm. He wanted to lick her skin to see if he could taste the brine of the sea.

She was everything he was supposed to hate, the gap in her overlarge front teeth an imperfection that she never failed to show off when she bared her teeth at her tormentors, and then used them to bite her bottom lip when her eyes fell on to him and she inevitably behaved like an imp just to see him try not to react.

She never treated him the same as the others, though he should be the worst. He was a Black. He was born to hate her; raised to trample her under his boot, and yet...

It was this fact that made him madder than anything else. He had no idea _why_ she would single him out, or why she thought she had the right to act so familiarly; to assume he was somehow _safe_, or somehow different than those who surrounded him like a guard; those who had decided he was theirs, and politics being what it was, he had no inclination to reveal to them the truth.

She seemed to notice, all of a sudden who she was sitting next to and paused; her thick eyebrows crossing a little as she swept her brown eyes over him for a moment, before she reached into her bag and pulled a small wooden cube from her pocket. The six sides were made up of nine smaller squares each, and each side was a block of colour, one colour per side. She moved a few different parts, making a mess of the thing before she smiled with satisfaction and placed it on his chair next to his hand, and then turned away, looking towards the front and taking notes with her strange quill with its brass nib.

It was only a matter of minutes before his mind had gone from being overwhelmed by having her in all of his senses to being entirely focussed on the wooden cube. What was it? Some sort of strange artifact? An instrument of some description?

Eventually he hissed with frustration and picked it up, keeping it below his desk to keep it hidden. He tried moving the bezels to and fro, and realised one was meant to bring it back to order; and he twisted the object back and forth in his hands, turning it over and twisting as he tried to restore order. He had made significant leeway before he realised he should be working, but when he placed the square back on his chair and picked up his quill, he found he was much better able to follow the professor's lesson. Certainly enough to know that Binns knew next to nothing about the goblin wars he was so obsessed with.

He found his fingers going back to the cube every once in a while to check it was still there, and to trace his fingers over the shape and the smoothness of the polished wood.

He expected Peverell to gloat or snatch the cube back at the end of the lesson, but she simply threw her books in her bag in the same manner that she took them out and rushed out of the classroom just like she usually did, not even looking back. Regulus took a deep breath and snuck the object into his pocket before he packed up his own things.

_**this story is a funny one. I came up with the premise one night by thinking of a scene that comes later of Michelle from Spider-Man Homecoming drawing a picture of Voldemort and showing him with her litttle pout thing she does in detention with peter Parker. **_

_**What followed was a scattered little story with no discernible end goal which scratches an itch I have in moments when I'm feeling overstimulated and wrung out from living autistic in a world that is not built for us. **_

_**As such, both Regulus and Hermione have symptoms? Characteristics? Of how I personally experience autism, which means that Regulus doesn't really have the usual traits that happen with boys. I think it's best to leave that to boys with autism and I'll just write what I want and what I need to basically. **_

_**This story also somehow filled a brief or goal I had for another story (which I'll start posting one of these days. I have so many woo'/ it's ridiculous) about what a time travel fix it would look like from outside of the bubble. This fic is only from Regulus' POV which makes it a bit snatchy and with a very limited knowledge of what is going on for the viewer. What do they call that again? Anyway, what that means is that the events of the story aren't very clear and I'm doing it on purpose. Sorry. **_

_**As for warnings there is underage sex in this story and also a sexual assault a few chapters in which I'all warn you about when we get closer. **_

_**That's if for now I think, other than strong language? **_

_**Anyway I hope you like this story. If you don't...well I wrote it for me anyway. **_


	2. Chapter 2

As was his recent habit, Eric Rowle stopped by Regulus' desk to wait for him to put his things away, and made scathing remarks about the girl who had so rudely imposed herself on him while Agatha Selwin (who he knew had managed to convince herself that she would one day be Lady Black) tried to 'soothe' him after having to sit next to the 'mudblood'. He sighed quietly but didn't interrupt them in their respective soliloquies. Sitting next to Peverell had been a taxing ordeal, but not for the reasons Selwin or Rowle thought, or could even conceive, and Selwin's pawing at his person was anything but soothing; especially as his nerves were alight from sitting next to someone who he refused to admit he'd much rather have within his personal space than either of his 'friends'.

after much thought, Regulus had decided in his third year that his parents' ideas about blood status were nothing but a foolish and badly scraped together myth and all 'muggleborns' were in all likelihood from magical bloodlines, only with disinherited squibs for ancestors; the records of whom were of course long ago lost to the magical community after being summarily banished into the magicless dark, the very place that the purebloods were so terrified of simply because they refused to learn anything about it.

Being upset that someone like Peverell had magic was like getting upset that an object you thought to be valueless rubbish was in fact a valuable treasure long after you threw it out. His mother had done just that several times however, and was always utterly furious at the revelation, so he supposed it followed that she would feel the same way about the children of squibs being born with full use of their magical core despite the emptiness of their parents' own.

No, that wasn't the problem with Peverell at all. It was the uninhibited, disinterested chaos she seemed to embody, and the way magic seemed to behave differently around her than it did around anyone else Regulus had encountered. Of course, it was also her brash, careless, messy existence. Such behavior could hardly be ignored, particularly by him; but there was more. His sensitivity to magic meant he could practically taste the wild magic around her when she was near, and there was something about her magic, and the way the wild magic in the air and nature interacted with her...which was like nothing he'd ever seen

Or even read about.

Of course, there was also the irritation that came from an unsolved mystery, the not knowing where she came from, and knowing that no one else did either; or how she always managed to disappear and reappear, easily traversing through a castle she was supposedly so new to; and how in Morgana she knew so many grey-bordering-on-dark hexes and spells, and brewed such perfect potions-or was so brilliant at always seeming to know when a curse was sent towards her, no matter how surreptitiously it was cast...and then there was the singular, unprecedented strangeness of her interactions with Regulus.

The cube wasn't the first such gift-though he refused to call them that, as he received them from an imp, and must be treated with the kind of wariness one would treat a gift from the fae-it was the third such...transaction...and every single one had the opposite effect that her presence did. As soon as his attention landed on it, his mind would clear and his thoughts would crystalise.

Even now he reached his hand into his pocket to touch the small, strange, ink-black fluffy creature that she had slipped into his pocket a month ago, and he felt more steady, alert. It nuzzled into his fingertips, the small purring vibrations calming him. He had called it Imp, after its gifter, and sometimes he carried it in his pocket, and other times he hid it on his shoulder, under his hair where it could purr in his ear or up against the back of his neck and soothe him.

It was a queer little thing; he hadn't yet found it in a book, but he was quite certain it wasn't of muggle origin. He hated how much he already loved the little beast, making sure to hide it from his housemates, as he knew they would want to terrorise it and tease him for owning something so damnably adorable. Just like they regularly claimed he was; despite his fearsome family, his personality's resemblance to a nundu, and his unequalled talent with a wand.

The first gift of course had been just as interesting and helpful, if entirely different to the ones that followed, in that it hadn't even been just for him. It had been a note on black paper that had been folded into the shape of a bear, which she had nonchalantly dropped on his table in the library as she breezed passed one evening quite early into her sojourn in the castle, not even looking at him. The animated paper beast had lumbered over to him and then sat on its haunches, seeming to stare at him despite its lack of eyes until he gave a frustrated huff and put it in his pocket.

When he'd eventually found himself alone and safe to read it, he unfolded it and let out a strained choking sound at its contents within,

Most Brilliant Black,

you're not imagining it.

the four bludgerheads in red have a way to track you and your friend with the nose. it's a complex bit of magic and extremely accurate, but some of the more comprehensive anti tracker precautions should be enough to ensure he's left alone, unless he goes looking for them like an idiot -which he might; my money is on him secretly wanting that Potter boy to plow him into next year, but you might at least tell him not to be such a little fool about it, and stop wasting our time with the unnecessary dramatics involved in the mating rituals of adolescent wizards

His eyes had widened at the last part, which was perhaps as accurate as it was vulgar, and he wound up laughing harder than he had in a good long while, thankful that no one could witness it.

It may have been crass, but her information had turned out to be good. Regulus had relished the increasingly frustrated expressions of his stupid brother and his stupid friends as the Marauders had found it increasingly difficult to find Severus, almost as much as he had relished his friend's shocked and guilty expression when he had read the neat silver script on the black paper.

He just wished he knew why she would want to help Regulus, whose most (outwardly) friendly overture towards her had been keeping the usual fantasies of cruciatus from his gaze when he glared her way as he tended to when he looked at other people, and it couldn't have been for Severus' benefit. The boy was as friendly as a chimera.

As far as he could tell, it wasn't a bribe or a prelude of some kind either. She certainly had no use for his status as heir of a Magical House, publically spurning Potter's increasingly insulted and possessive overtures where he declared them 'family' and she continued to tell him that she had no use for such a 'useless, spoiled boy' as a relative.

Regulus and his everpresent clingers made their way to the great hall for lunch, and he couldn't help subtly seeking out the pile of hair peeking over the crowd of heads between them that signified the presence of Peverell. Her hair wasn't actually always messy; it seemed to go in cycles, and as the secret owner of wildly curly hair himself, he knew the upkeep he chose to involve himself in to keep his hair tamed was a lot of work that she simply didn't seem all that interested in, and on top of that, his hair actually seemed calm and reasonable when compared to hers. Even though he was appalled that she seemed not to care if it looked bedraggled or openly displayed her emotions to those around her at any given time, he could understand that with the regularity of her magic seeming to lash out or react without her conscious permission, it seemed her hair, in all likelihood, could never quite be tamed as he managed to. Nevertheless, such lack of control and the blasé attitude she had about it make Regulus feel uneasy.

Presently, she was sitting at the rowdy Griff table with a book opened on her lap and was putting a valiant effort into feigning nonchalance as his brother and his friends kept touching her hair and trying to flirt with her. Sirius, whose foolish attentions had only been spurred on by the sum of her previous rejections, had his arm lazily flung over her narrow shoulders. Regulus could see she was uncomfortable, and he could certainly empathise. Sirius played Beater in quidditch, and while Peverell had certainly gained some meat on her bones since getting regular meals at Hogwarts, she was still far from an ideal weight for someone who had to climb as many stairs in a day as Hogwarts students did, let alone the magical expenditure. That Beater's arm would be heavy.

Pettegrew was on her other side playing with a curl, and whispered something in her ear with a predatory look on his face, which made Regulus shudder from across the room-let alone what Peverell must be feeling-when something shifted in the air around them. At that moment she seemed to sense Regulus' gaze and she looked up, her amber eyes sparkling in a way that made his stomach tighten with a feeling he refused to identify. He saw her pillowed lips tick up at the edges, and suddenly her hair awoke, and it turned into a pile of shifting, and then writhing snakes seemingly spontaneously.

Sirius' yelp could be heard across the room as an orange snake with three heads snapped all sets of its fangs at his fingers, which he promptly removed from her person along with his arm, shocked into an apology. However it was Peter Pettigrew that the spell had evidently been aimed at, as an adder whipped out and bit him on the cheek, easily reaching him despite his retreat, which had landed him practically in an awed Lupin's lap.

Regulus had to remind himself to breathe. Why did she make him feel like this?

...Well, this time was a little more understandable. Not only had it been perfectly wicked, and so elegantly executed, nor was the fact that she managed to look incredibly sexy while adorned by so many snakes of exotic colours the thing that struck him like lightning down his spine. Oh, but it had been a staggering feat of self transfiguration, at a level that had McGonagall shocked into actually gaping in shock rather than screaming about detentions, or worrying over Pettigrew's pained moaning and bleeding face, and it had been silently and wandlessly cast, without looking at the subject-Regulus knew this for certain, as she had been looking at him, and he certainly hadn't been holding a mirror while he stared at her with far greater appetite than he had for his lunch. He had to suppress the urge to bite his lip or otherwise display in any way the flood of want that raced through him as she stood, her entire air one of regal nonchalance, even as she packed up a sandwich and apple in a napkin, and waltzed out of the room as if she was wearing a crown on her head, rather than a pile of live reptiles who were coiling together, and fading back to her usual tangled brunette locks.

By the time she had reached the door, the excitable reactions in the room had raised in volume to a roar. Regulus flicked his eyes to Severus only to see him looking absolutely delighted. The boy was almost smiling.


End file.
